Catholic social teaching

Human dignity: every person has irreducible worth, not earned by usefulness, legal status, or behaviour.

The common good: societies are judged by whether everyone can flourish, not by aggregate wealth.

Solidarity: we are responsible for one another across borders and classes.

Subsidiarity: decisions belong at the most local level able to make them well: which cuts against both bureaucratic overreach and abandoning people to fend for themselves.

The preferential option for the poor: when interests conflict, the needs of the poorest weigh most.

Care for creation: the environment is not a separate issue from justice, as Laudato Si' argues at length.

Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII, 1891) on labour, wages, and unions; Quadragesimo Anno (1931); Pacem in Terris (1963); Populorum Progressio (1967); Laborem Exercens (1981); Centesimus Annus (1991); Caritas in Veritate (2009); Laudato Si' (2015); Fratelli Tutti (2020).

It does not map onto any political party, and it regularly annoys everyone.

The doctrinal ground is not an economic theory. It is Christ's own statement that what is done to the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the unclothed, the sick, and the imprisoned is done to him.

The Catechism draws the corporal and spiritual works of mercy directly from that passage, and treats neglect of the poor as a matter of salvation rather than good manners.

It matters that the one who said it had been poor, displaced as a child, and executed as a criminal. Catholic social teaching is not the Church being political. It is the Church taking the Incarnation seriously.

Because every person has dignity, each has rights: to life, food, shelter, health care, education, migration in need, religious liberty, and participation in public life. Rights carry corresponding duties to one another.

Work is not only a way to earn. Rerum Novarum and Laborem Exercens teach that work has dignity because the worker does, which grounds just wages, safe conditions, rest, and the right to organise in unions.

Property is legitimate but not absolute. The Church has taught since the Fathers that the goods of the earth have a universal destination, so surplus in the face of another's need carries an obligation.

Corporal: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, bury the dead.

Spiritual: counsel the doubtful, instruct the ignorant, admonish sinners, comfort the afflicted, forgive offences, bear wrongs patiently, pray for the living and the dead.

These are ordinary and repeatable on purpose. They are how the principles above stop being an argument.

It does not say poverty, illness, disability, or oppression are holy in themselves. It calls them injustice and asks that they be ended.

It does not ask anyone to endure abuse or exploitation patiently. Bearing wrongs patiently concerns ordinary slights, never violence, coercion, or trafficking.

It does not hand anyone a party platform. The principles cut across every political alignment, and it is possible to hold them faithfully and still argue about policy.